


Name, Rank, and Serial Number

by forthegreatergood



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 19:44:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1523279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forthegreatergood/pseuds/forthegreatergood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Steve rescues Bucky from the HYDRA base, he's not sure how much of it is happening and how much of it is just wishful thinking.</p>
<hr/><p>A Nazi peeling off his skin and declaring himself beyond human doesn’t even get a rise out of him anymore, but Bucky doesn’t think he could stand it if Steve ripped off his face, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Name, Rank, and Serial Number

**Author's Note:**

> All characters property of Marvel.
> 
> Not beta-read. Please post any noticed errors in the comments, and they'll get fixed.

Bucky’s not sure what they’ve pumped him full of this time, but he likes it a lot better than the stuff that made him see spiders under his skin or the stuff that made his veins feel like they were on fire. He’s seeing Steve again, for one thing. He didn’t think that was going to happen before they finally punched his ticket. People don’t come back from this wing, and once they started in on him, he figured out why real quick. They were only so many guinea pigs to HYDRA, and it wasn’t going to stop until something finally killed him. He blinks a few times to clear his eyes, and he thinks he might be still mumbling his serial number. Or, really, whatever numbers he remembers. The important thing is to keep talking. Let ‘em know they haven’t beat you yet, you’re not ready to give anything up. He blinks at Steve, and he can’t quite bring himself to care that it’s Steve reimagined as that goofy comic book hero the privates like to read about.

Captain America rips the straps right off the damn table, and isn’t that a sight? He tries to ask Steve if he ever got that factory job, or if he kept in touch with that date Bucky found for him before he shipped out, but the only thing he can manage is Steve’s name. It’s like his mouth is having a hard time keeping up with his brain, which _really_ makes him wonder what was in that needle, because usually he’s got precisely the opposite problem. 

“I thought you were dead!” Steve pulls him close, and it makes every injury he’s racked up on that table just scream with it, but he tries to make his legs work anyway. His weird fever-dream of Steve is plenty big enough to hold him up and steer him right, and there’s some small, stubborn part of him that just won’t let go of how absurd this is.

“I thought you were smaller,” he manages, and he’s a little ashamed of how slurred his voice is. He doesn’t want to sound like he’s spent the last three hours screaming. Not in front of Steve. Not here. “What happened to you?”

“I joined the Army,” Steve jokes, holding him up.

This close, he can see the ridiculous flag-colored costume under the leather jacket, and he understands that he’s losing his mind. He spent the last night he had with Steve trying and failing to get it through his thick skull that the war was no place for someone like him, trying and failing to tell him that the only reason Bucky wasn’t a wreck was because he knew Steve would be safe. Their last night as friends, and they’d spent it arguing. So he doesn’t want to die with that on his shoulders. He doesn’t feel the least bit sorry about _that_. He figures this might even pass for normal, this desire to patch things up before he kicks off. The whole turning Steve into a Charles Atlas ringer and putting him in a skintight circus costume thing...that, he’s not so sure about.

He stops thinking about it and starts asking whatever stupid questions he can come up with just to hear Steve’s voice. “Did it hurt? Is this permanent?”

Listening to Steve as he answers makes up for the letters he didn’t send, the letters he never got answering the letters he never sent. It dissolves the worry in his gut that Steve wasn’t writing because he was too sick to, or because he’d been hurt without Bucky there to back him up. 

They’re brought up short by some commandant and a scientist, and Bucky thinks he recognizes the commandant. He’s woozy, and the air’s distorted with the heat rolling off the lower levels, but he thinks he recognizes that nightmare of a voice. Steve leaves him propped up against the railing to go duke it out with the guy, and it’s like watching titans fight right up until the commandant rips off his goddamn face and _this_ , this is the hallucination he knows from before. He waits for the fire, or the bridge, or Steve, or himself, to start melting or turning inside out. He’s seen some weird stuff from the chemicals they’ve shot him up with. 

Steve scrambles back to him as the bridge starts to recede, and the commandant is ranting about how Steve is like him. Steve is special, better than human. Steve needs to embrace his destiny. 

“You don’t have one of those, do you?” Bucky asks. He watches the mask flutter down into the flames. 

A Nazi peeling off his skin and declaring himself beyond human doesn’t even get a rise out of him anymore, but Bucky doesn’t think he could stand it if Steve ripped off his face, too. It doesn’t happen, though. The commandant leaves, and Steve grabs him and tries to navigate them through the factory’s death throes. He crawls across the girder before it falls, Steve’s voice growing fainter behind him, fading more and more into the roar of the fire. When the girder goes, and Steve tells him to go on, to save himself, everything in him rebels. Delusion or not, he’s not leaving. He’s not letting go again. Steve shakes his head at his stubbornness and gets a running start, and then it’s all Bucky can do not to break down as a sheet of flame erupts and he loses sight of him. When Steve slams into the railing, Bucky doesn’t understand how something he knows isn’t real can be such a relief. He scrambles to help him up and over. He’s still weak, shaky, and clumsy, and he doesn’t wind up helping much. Steve’s got him, though, and he’s got Steve, and they’re running before the rest of the building collapses.

*****

It’s not until they’re rounding up the survivors of the escape and trying to formulate some sort of plan that doesn’t rely on the broken transponder carried by a figment of his imagination that Bucky starts thinking that some of this might be happening. His head’s clearer now, and the air’s cold, and the pain’s real but manageable. The men clapping him on the back or asking him for help or ignoring him to wait for orders from Steve are much more solid and individuated than hallucinations usually are. 

Or at least, he thinks, than the hallucinations he’s had courtesy of HYDRA have been. 

He’s never tried absinthe, so he’s not sure about other hallucinations.

Bucky figures it might be the fifth or sixth time Steve gives orders and people listen to him that he finally lets himself think it’s real. The men are real; he knows most of them by sight, if not by name. They’re loading the casualties and the soldiers with any medical training onto the transport, and everyone’s scavenging what they can for weapons, rations, and clothes. They’ll probably get picked up by friendlies before they get back to held territory, but they can’t count on it. He finally looks at Steve like he might not be the last gasp of his dying brain, and he decides that really, it must be the last gasp of his dying brain.

He hasn’t seen Steve in months, sure, but he’s known Steve all his life. This Steve is twice as big as his Steve. This Steve went toe-to-toe with a guy who almost put his fist through a sheet of solid steel and doesn’t seem much the worse for wear. There’s no way this Steve is his Steve, not in a world where things make sense. But then he remembers the commandant with the tear-away face, who told Steve that he was only still pretending to be human, and Bucky loses his footing again. He doesn’t know anything that can explain this. He finds himself touching Steve and frowning.

“It’s really you, isn’t it?” he asks. “I’m not dreaming?”

“Yeah, Buck, it’s really me,” Steve answers. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I think so. But, I mean.” He gestures at Steve. “ _How_?”

“Dr. Erskine. He was a scientist. There was a process. At the end of it, they cracked the case and this is what I was,” Steve tells him with a shrug. “I don’t understand it much better than that myself. They’re trying to recreate it, but Dr. Erskine was brilliant.”

“He made the guy with the face, too?”

“Yeah. Him, too.”

Bucky leans against him and soaks in the fact that he seems so real, so solid. He hopes this isn’t a dream. He doesn’t know if he could take it if he woke up back on that table. Steve’s arms wrap around him, and they feel real.

“Your face really doesn’t do that, though, right?” Bucky asks.

“It’s just my face. You don’t think I’d have traded up for a better one if I could’ve?” Steve’s grin has a worried edge to it, like he thinks Bucky might fall over it he lets go.

“You idiot,” Bucky laughs. He hugs Steve back, and he feels like the ground’s shifting under him. He’s not too sure who he’s hanging onto right this second, but he does know that he wouldn’t let go for anything.


End file.
